Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”
And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities.
Daniel Goldstein
3 years ago
Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”
And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities. The “victims” always come from somewhere else.
John Mattingley
3 years ago
An excellent and informative article, Aris. Thank you greatly.
Ferox Mill
3 years ago
First let me congratulate you on putting out an article on mainstream media that is not written for children. This is a very welcomed new development these days. “ Second, I am one of those literal nazis that are popping up in social media everywhere these days precisely because of the problems you are talking about. So let me tell you that the references to the Ottoman empire is something that is being actively discussed and researched in our small corner of the internet. In fact, the way we call journalists working for publications like Buzzfeed is Janissaries. For those not versed in Ottoman history, Janissaries were a caste of officials that the Ottomans created by kidnapping children from the conquered Byzantine Empire and then proceeded to educate in the ways of the new empire. The way we see things, the Global system takes healthy children from the Midwest, turns them gay drug addicts bent on “social justice” and puts them to work for the system. Janissaries is most apt. “ But overall we make the same reading you do with the caveat that we do identify who the global class is comprised of and why it does what it does. Hence, what we predict is what is already happening, the local working class is turning national socialist and racist and we think this is a fantastic development for us “locals”. We know the global class is not going to give us our political sovereignty back by just asking.
Will Fipps
3 years ago
Maybe I need to read it again but something seems to be missing from this assessment. The particular heraldry of status-forward signalling is not just an organically developed semaphore for padding the neurotic insecurities of the spiritually adrift bourgeoisie with a surrogate social validation to compliment the psychic padding of their superfluous material affluence, but rather is rendered effective social currency precisely by its synonymity with establishment power, whereby the social ostracism meted out to one guilty of failure to parrot the prescribed ritual gestures and dogmas is echoed by official statute, and the legal punishment meted out by the state for the same transgression is echoed in the contemporary logic of social ostracism. The current cosmopolitan religion is a STATE religion, and its administration and enforcement lend to political, not just socioeconomic, ends. What these ends are and the particular mechanism by which their means, as detailed by the article, are undertaken toward them, is beyond my purview to intelligibly suggest, and is left wholly untreated upon by the article.
Is it that these spheres of agenda and influence are simply indistinguishable, and political celebrities merely participate in a more visible sector of the cosmopolitan status pyramid, playing for higher stakes at the pinnacle of geopolitical graft?
The idea that cosmopolitanism will fade when potential adherents no longer see it as high status I have seen before – but the juxtaposition with Marx suggesting that the very idea of neoliberal “wokeness” enduring is absurd was new to me. Good piece,
cjhartnett1
3 years ago
This is a subtle and nuanced article, with lots of ramifications. Of course, David Goodhart gave rise to the ” somewheres” versus the ” anywheres” and you apply the notion with an anthropological, historical deftness of touch that adds texture and richness to what is defining the two polarising classes we now live in. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, there was a screaming ” peace dividend” on offer. But Bush, Hammer and the likes of Major saw it as a financial excuse to bury Yeltsin and the Russians in their destitution, and waded into Iraq too. The Warsaw Pact and its useful idiots in the West, were able to avoid punishment,let alone repudiation and slipped into EU politics, Green movements and academia Catastrophic. Like calling Soros a Cultural Marxist, calling these types cosmopolitan is mere wordplay and power. Both descriptions are valid, when either is questioned, you can bet that it’s a traitor who’s squealing. Other key words, sustainability…solidarity….new normal etc…are also indicators of the ubermenschen who seek to control our words. And reveal their own restricted codes as pidgin Esperanto for the benefit for Schwab’s Coming Project. Indeed, Bush in 1992 went in with Agenda 21 , and now we’ve got Gore as a result.
cjhartnett1
3 years ago
A good article that raises plenty questions. Which is a good thing in itself. The ability for ourselves not to agree- indeed to contradict, double down- on what terms we choose to use for them is a start. Orwell told us of this, words are power and language has been so debauched and policed by the idiot left that we must continually besmirch and belittle in their virgin fields. They’ve had these to themselves for too long. Next up, it’s clear that these moral pigmies have no concept of truth as it aligns with reality as we live it. And so they are ideal kowtowers for Xi and the godless CCP. As well as willing mask wearers for Islam or Fauci, depending on who grooms then first. Only scorn, mockery with violence lurking behind the smile will deal with them. They’ve never reasoned, so why bother now? Finally, that social anthropologies and other crack( quack) notions( lotions) give up voices from the inside like our writer here : is greatly appreciated. These clowns we fight know nothing but a few passwords to their sad empty dorms. Once we use them, they quickly come to heel.
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
In my view, cosmopolitanism is essentially a Hegelian ideal which within contemporary metropolitan idealism is seen as the answer to many of our global problems, i.e climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological degradation due to human expansionism.
However, pragmatic obstacles prevent the realisation of cosmopolitanism in any life affirming way except through cultural rhetoric.
In particular, is the insurmountable problem of distributing national fair shares of resource consumption, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and other planetary limits. https://www.sciencedirect.c…
Consequently, it is acknowledged, even by cosmopolitan sustainability scientists, that regions need to manage their ecological impacts themselves. https://stockholmresilience…
The cosmopolitan ideal is further compromised by the fact that transnational trade further destabilises the operation of the Earth System. https://bilaterals.org/?exp…
It is similarly compromised by the uneven ecological accounts of different countries, whereby a rational approach towards migratory flows means transnational migration should be directed towards ecological credit countries. http://data.footprintnetwor…
Recent work by cosmopolitan sustainability professionals, in particular in the field of Earth jurisprudence, is to give legal protection to the entirety of Earth systems, but this does not detract from the pragmatic obstacles above. https://mahb.stanford.edu/b…
Essentially, the lofty cultural idealism of cosmopolitanism is bounded and limited by the reality of our variable ecologies which are better managed at more local levels in cooperation with other localities. https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/
Rob Alka
3 years ago
Why do we have to make binary choices? Can’t I be comfortable within my own “society base camp” while also being worldly? Can’t I be curious, respectful, enlightened and stimulated by how other societies live, be open minded to how my society can learn, borrow, be inspired from their’s, but without being woken up by the call for prayer from a mosque just down the road or walking along our local shopping high street and bumping into daleks or people wearing burkas or being knifed by a overload of “black people who matter” or having nowhere to go on holiday that is any different to where I am already except for more sunshine and open air restaurants? Where’s the cultural exchange in that?
The notion that globalism is a moral imperative is vacuous unless it addresses the distinction between society and economics. There should be no need to trade-off the former (a societal sense of belonging) for the latter (global trading and cooperation without barriers).
Or look at this way: society is already a multi-cultured, multi-coloured experience. Up to a point that serves a need for all living creatures: stimulation. But force-fed cosmopolitanism can lead to over-stimulation, creating over-excitability, fractiousness, mental imbalance and hostility (aka identity politics).
If the cosmopolitan-ists have their way and National Brotherhood Week becomes permanent togetherness, assimilation and intermarriage, then the stimulating colourfulness of cosmopolitanism melds into a 1-colour blob. This is worse than ending up back where we started. We end up dulling the variety which is the spice of life. At that stage, where does society get its stimulation?
Stuart Chambers
3 years ago
This is pessimistic article about cosmopolitanism and shows little understanding of cosmopolitanism’s merits, especially its ability to prevent blind loyalty to nation, class, race, or religion. Better to read Martha Nussbaum’s take on cosmopolitanism or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book on the issue. They understand cosmopolitanism at a more nuanced level.
Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”
And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities.
Quote: As Marx himself declared in 1848, “all the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market,” to such a degree that “to call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.”
And yet the left loves cosmopolitanism, often promoting it in terms of “universal brotherhood”. I suppose that’s the ideology of the bourgeois left. They cannot see cosmopolitanism as having a destructive impact on settled communities. The “victims” always come from somewhere else.
An excellent and informative article, Aris. Thank you greatly.
First let me congratulate you on putting out an article on mainstream media that is not written for children. This is a very welcomed new development these days.
“
Second, I am one of those literal nazis that are popping up in social media everywhere these days precisely because of the problems you are talking about. So let me tell you that the references to the Ottoman empire is something that is being actively discussed and researched in our small corner of the internet. In fact, the way we call journalists working for publications like Buzzfeed is Janissaries.
For those not versed in Ottoman history, Janissaries were a caste of officials that the Ottomans created by kidnapping children from the conquered Byzantine Empire and then proceeded to educate in the ways of the new empire. The way we see things, the Global system takes healthy children from the Midwest, turns them gay drug addicts bent on “social justice” and puts them to work for the system. Janissaries is most apt.
“
But overall we make the same reading you do with the caveat that we do identify who the global class is comprised of and why it does what it does. Hence, what we predict is what is already happening, the local working class is turning national socialist and racist and we think this is a fantastic development for us “locals”. We know the global class is not going to give us our political sovereignty back by just asking.
Maybe I need to read it again but something seems to be missing from this assessment. The particular heraldry of status-forward signalling is not just an organically developed semaphore for padding the neurotic insecurities of the spiritually adrift bourgeoisie with a surrogate social validation to compliment the psychic padding of their superfluous material affluence, but rather is rendered effective social currency precisely by its synonymity with establishment power, whereby the social ostracism meted out to one guilty of failure to parrot the prescribed ritual gestures and dogmas is echoed by official statute, and the legal punishment meted out by the state for the same transgression is echoed in the contemporary logic of social ostracism. The current cosmopolitan religion is a STATE religion, and its administration and enforcement lend to political, not just socioeconomic, ends. What these ends are and the particular mechanism by which their means, as detailed by the article, are undertaken toward them, is beyond my purview to intelligibly suggest, and is left wholly untreated upon by the article.
Is it that these spheres of agenda and influence are simply indistinguishable, and political celebrities merely participate in a more visible sector of the cosmopolitan status pyramid, playing for higher stakes at the pinnacle of geopolitical graft?
I do like this. Is it a very extended joke?
The idea that cosmopolitanism will fade when potential adherents no longer see it as high status I have seen before – but the juxtaposition with Marx suggesting that the very idea of neoliberal “wokeness” enduring is absurd was new to me. Good piece,
This is a subtle and nuanced article, with lots of ramifications.
Of course, David Goodhart gave rise to the ” somewheres” versus the ” anywheres” and you apply the notion with an anthropological, historical deftness of touch that adds texture and richness to what is defining the two polarising classes we now live in.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, there was a screaming ” peace dividend” on offer. But Bush, Hammer and the likes of Major saw it as a financial excuse to bury Yeltsin and the Russians in their destitution, and waded into Iraq too.
The Warsaw Pact and its useful idiots in the West, were able to avoid punishment,let alone repudiation and slipped into EU politics, Green movements and academia
Catastrophic.
Like calling Soros a Cultural Marxist, calling these types cosmopolitan is mere wordplay and power. Both descriptions are valid, when either is questioned, you can bet that it’s a traitor who’s squealing.
Other key words, sustainability…solidarity….new normal etc…are also indicators of the ubermenschen who seek to control our words. And reveal their own restricted codes as pidgin Esperanto for the benefit for Schwab’s Coming Project. Indeed, Bush in 1992 went in with Agenda 21 , and now we’ve got Gore as a result.
A good article that raises plenty questions. Which is a good thing in itself.
The ability for ourselves not to agree- indeed to contradict, double down- on what terms we choose to use for them is a start. Orwell told us of this, words are power and language has been so debauched and policed by the idiot left that we must continually besmirch and belittle in their virgin fields. They’ve had these to themselves for too long.
Next up, it’s clear that these moral pigmies have no concept of truth as it aligns with reality as we live it. And so they are ideal kowtowers for Xi and the godless CCP. As well as willing mask wearers for Islam or Fauci, depending on who grooms then first. Only scorn, mockery with violence lurking behind the smile will deal with them. They’ve never reasoned, so why bother now?
Finally, that social anthropologies and other crack( quack) notions( lotions) give up voices from the inside like our writer here : is greatly appreciated. These clowns we fight know nothing but a few passwords to their sad empty dorms. Once we use them, they quickly come to heel.
In my view, cosmopolitanism is essentially a Hegelian ideal which within contemporary metropolitan idealism is seen as the answer to many of our global problems, i.e climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological degradation due to human expansionism.
However, pragmatic obstacles prevent the realisation of cosmopolitanism in any life affirming way except through cultural rhetoric.
In particular, is the insurmountable problem of distributing national fair shares of resource consumption, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and other planetary limits.
https://www.sciencedirect.c…
Consequently, it is acknowledged, even by cosmopolitan sustainability scientists, that regions need to manage their ecological impacts themselves.
https://stockholmresilience…
The cosmopolitan ideal is further compromised by the fact that transnational trade further destabilises the operation of the Earth System.
https://bilaterals.org/?exp…
It is similarly compromised by the uneven ecological accounts of different countries, whereby a rational approach towards migratory flows means transnational migration should be directed towards ecological credit countries.
http://data.footprintnetwor…
Recent work by cosmopolitan sustainability professionals, in particular in the field of Earth jurisprudence, is to give legal protection to the entirety of Earth systems, but this does not detract from the pragmatic obstacles above.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/b…
Essentially, the lofty cultural idealism of cosmopolitanism is bounded and limited by the reality of our variable ecologies which are better managed at more local levels in cooperation with other localities.
https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/
Why do we have to make binary choices? Can’t I be comfortable within my own “society base camp” while also being worldly? Can’t I be curious, respectful, enlightened and stimulated by how other societies live, be open minded to how my society can learn, borrow, be inspired from their’s, but without being woken up by the call for prayer from a mosque just down the road or walking along our local shopping high street and bumping into daleks or people wearing burkas or being knifed by a overload of “black people who matter” or having nowhere to go on holiday that is any different to where I am already except for more sunshine and open air restaurants? Where’s the cultural exchange in that?
The notion that globalism is a moral imperative is vacuous unless it addresses the distinction between society and economics. There should be no need to trade-off the former (a societal sense of belonging) for the latter (global trading and cooperation without barriers).
Or look at this way: society is already a multi-cultured, multi-coloured experience. Up to a point that serves a need for all living creatures: stimulation. But force-fed cosmopolitanism can lead to over-stimulation, creating over-excitability, fractiousness, mental imbalance and hostility (aka identity politics).
If the cosmopolitan-ists have their way and National Brotherhood Week becomes permanent togetherness, assimilation and intermarriage, then the stimulating colourfulness of cosmopolitanism melds into a 1-colour blob. This is worse than ending up back where we started. We end up dulling the variety which is the spice of life. At that stage, where does society get its stimulation?
This is pessimistic article about cosmopolitanism and shows little understanding of cosmopolitanism’s merits, especially its ability to prevent blind loyalty to nation, class, race, or religion. Better to read Martha Nussbaum’s take on cosmopolitanism or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book on the issue. They understand cosmopolitanism at a more nuanced level.